«Lacrimosa» by Oleksandr Shchetynskyі: music written in wartime with the faith in triumph of Humanity and Light

Abstract

Statement of the problem. Recent research and publications. The piece titled “Lacrimosa” for six instruments by Oleksandr Shchetynsky has been written in the beginning of full-scale war, when the Russian troops were dislocated near Kyiv, when the city was shelled every day. The relevancy of this topic of research is caused by a need for musicological comprehension of a musical piece, written in the times of war as a critical situation. Theoretical basis of the article is founded on the sources from the different spheres of humanitarian knowledge. The usage of the term “crisis” caused appeal to the works on psychology, philosophy and aesthetics (Bulakh, 2016; Stasevska, 2016; Frankle, 2020; Fromm, 2013) with the aim to accentuate personal, spiritual aspect of this phenomenon. The main theses of the article by Australian scholars (Meyrick & Barnett, 2020) are used to emphasise importance and necessity of creative activity as a mechanism allowing to preserve humanity in the conditions of a crisis. The work by А. Erll (2011) became a foundation of the idea about musical text being a reminiscence about traumatic past or present times. The research by P. Rud (2021 a, 2021 b) is an important addition to studying O. Shchetynsky’s work. Objectives and scientific novelty of the studу. The purpose of the article is to research Oleksandr Shchetynsky’s “Lacrimosa” for six instruments (2022) in the context of a spiritual crisis that took place in the beginning of full-scale war of Russia against Ukraine. Novelty of the study is caused by comprehension of a musical work in several dimensions: 1) as one that was written “here and now”, one being an objectification of artist’s reflection on the war; 2) one continuing the row of instrumental works on spiritual themes in the context of the composer’s creativity, his search in the spheres of sonority and organization of the sound in the time and space; 3) the one being the part of Ukrainian and European musical cultures of XXI century. Research results and conclusion. O. Shchetynsky’s “Lacrimosa” continues a row of spiritual works by the composer, being a text of memory, which bears the information about traumatic present codified in it. The concentration on today (“darkness”) is combined with a semantic vector directed to the future (“victory over it”) determines the specifics of the temporal organization of the work, where there is a movement towards a cathartic melody in the spirit of a Ukrainian folk song. Semantic multidimensionality of the prayer, that becomes a code programming the composition, defines the organization of sound space as well, which has lines and layers of different significance interacting with each other, as well as work with the sound and sound matter, that is essential for O. Shchetynsky’s compositional technique. Elegant construction of the composition is caused by well-thought organization of different attributes: pitches, motives, themes, rhythms, textures and timbres. Thus, the end result is an artistic unity, with the experience of creating and understanding it is a way to overcome destructive influence of critical situation, allowing to realize the idea of productive creative life, “spiritual energy of harmony”